Bohemian Rhapsody

Remember the line in Wayne’s World that goes “Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide.” My Frampton Comes Alive was Queen’s Greatest Hits – you were seemed to be issued with it at ten years old.

Most of the civilised world is probably aware of the difficult birth Bohemian Rhapsody has had, including the hiring and firing of its director (once) and lead actor (twice), never a good sign. But after seeing the pretty impressive trailer and as a fan of Queen’s imperial phase (see above), I booked a few tickets for two of my oldest friends who are more Queen obsessive than me, plus the GLW – very much a floating voter.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a very inconsistent film, with some great set pieces let down by some clunky dialogue and a ridiculous disregard for the band’s history. In this universe, the success of the band in the early 80s is ignored and Freddie leaves the band to do solo material and live hedonistically, then is talked back in to rejoining the band, comes out to his family AND gets diagnosed as HIV positive – all in the run up to Live Aid. Some of the moments look corny but actually happened (the mic stand breaking which Mercury turned into a trademark, Kenny Everett breaking the title song by playing it on his show). But there are too many portentous one-liners and not enough of a feeling of what it was like to be there – it comes across as a formulaic rock biopic with everything but the montage sequence.

Many have remarked on what a good job Rami Malek has done portraying Freddie Mercury, and he is pretty impressive, though he can’t help looking more like Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil in a succession of wigs and moustaches. Some of the live set pieces are spectacular, and Malek is great in these, but I was surprised to be unmoved by the Live Aid recreation at the film’s end – there is so much CGI it felt like a computer game version with its eerily uniform ‘crowd’ and ‘impossible’ shots from odd bits of the stage, just because they could.

To sum up, I don’t mind that some of the excess has been sanitised, or the odd bad wig, but the messing around with history to make Live Aid the final shot at redemption, and the poor script are a real disappointment.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Ray, Walk the Line and other undemanding rock biopics. The GLW liked it a lot more than me, so my review could be the grouching of a fan who expected more.

Comments

Sacha Baron Cohen is so obviously the perfect choice to play Freddie that I kind of lost interest in the film long before it came out. I have read that he walked when Brian May described a vision of the film where the band go from strength to strength after Freddie’s death, though I assume his qualms would relate to being written out of the story so early rather than historical accuracy.

Freddie Mercury – born 1946 – a person/family forced to live and survive a long way from home – exists at the (admittedly) fag end of the Golden Age in Swinging London = chances of a really interesting film.

This film clearly isn’t that film. It’s kinda like Queen themselves.
After the Lord Mayor’s Show … job done … Cosmic!

I saw it this afternoon at the IMAX at Waterloo which is a suitably over the top cinema in which to watch a Queen biopic. It’s big and loud and in your face – the screen that is. The film’s almost that too, and much better than the reviews have suggested.

It’s really two films. One’s an enjoyable Monkees-ish romp about a band getting together, getting big, falling out and falling back in. Okay so some of the songs are out of order (and this must be deliberate – someone must have known that Fat Bottomed Girls wasn’t written before Night At The Opera) but the detail’s fascinating, it’s very funny at times, and the May and Deacon impersonations are uncanny. That Is Brian May. It IS.

Then there’s an awful clunking and insultingly bad film about a gay man’s inability to admit his sexuality to himself, even though everyone else already seems to accept it. Dreadful dialogue and long… meaningful… pauses. [Sidebar: bad writers hide behind big themes – death, illness, mental health – because they’re not good enough to write about the small ones.]

Malek doesn’t have Freddie’s build but in every other way he’s spot on – the mannerisms, the movement, the speaking voice – but yeah some dodgy wigs. Weird how the film business can CGI whole worlds but has never really been able to do wigs.

I loved the Live Aid recreation. Maybe it was the big Imax screen, but being on stage there with the band was awesome. Big grins and clap clap (hands up) clap clap (hands up) all the way back to the tube.

Great review. As I was alive contenmporaraeneously and at the same time, I can attest to the fact that Queen were already doing quite nicely thanks and the Live Aid concert wasn’t a make-or-break do or die performance. Freddie was a great stage performer and Queen blew the roof off. So much so – they had to rebuild Wembley! Why not make that part of the story too? Might as well.

Has there ever been a good Rock biopic? I can’t think of one. I really loved the Doors film when it came out – I was a teenager at the time – didn’t know any better and just enjoyed the music and the story and the fantasy – and the Doors music blasting out loud in a grotty Rochdale cinema in the olden days – who cares about accuracy and detail when yr a kid?- and maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s what this Queen film is meant to do.

The credits include three Guitar Coaches, one Bass Coach and three Drum Coaches, so there’s at least some effort to make it presentable, and ‘Brian’s’ studio solo on Bo Rap looks about right, if a bit stilted. He also joins in the control room banter by speaking into his pickups, which is a nice touch.

My friend’s brother, a professional session drummer, is the man under the blonde wig, playing live in the live scenes.

The Live Aid backstage scenery was built as an exact replica. When you walked through the curtain onto the Wembley Stadium stage, you faced a field of cows in Hertfordshire. The crowd were blue-screened in later.

The crowd CGI was awful but it didn’t detract from the overall impact I thought. I’ve just watched the original and the care that went into the re-creation is incredible. The arrangement of Pepsi and Beer on the piano for example, or Freddie and Rami stopping to adjust the volume at precisely the same moment. You’re so close you can see Deacon’s got two green picks stuck in his pick guard. As he did.

Two glaring mistakes in the crowd shots though. Not everyone in the 80s dressed like Marty McFly. They obviously told the crowd extras to dress in 80s clothes so everyone turned up looking like an 80s revival night with bandanas, hawaian shirts and Duran Duran cheekbones. Also, I promise you, no non-partisan crowd in 1985 knew all the words to bloody Hammer to Fall.

The close involvement of May and Taylor meant this was never going to be anything other than an authorised/sanitised version of the band’s story. Haven’t seen it yet, but heard Kate Mossman talking about it on Radio 4’s Front Row a few days ago and she seemed to have enjoyed it.

Queen = four blokes who make a great racket. Best rock band since the Zep, at the time.
Queen = a band who always had their tongue firmly in their cheek. Complete opposite to Zep.
Queen = a band whose story arcs into tragedy, but who lived it pretty magnificently.
Queen = a band about whom any biopic is doomed if you demand a documentary approach.
Queen = a band who always, always, always wanted you to ENJOY YOURSELF.

So I won’t pay any attention to those who find fault with this fillum, I’ll just WALLOW in it.

Even though I’m not a great fan it would be a fool who denied that they were a magnificent singles band at the very least. They never made the slightest attempt to be cool and some sectors of music fandom find that even harder to forgive than bands who try to be cool and fail.

Taylor has always seemed a decent enough cove, happy to have the piss ripped out of him on various BBC comedy things (Thotch springs to mind).

Whereas Brian seems to have a thin-skinned point scoring need to get his due that poisoned everything from very early on. It took him years to get over Taylor receiving half the royalties for Bo Rap when the drummer’s song appeared on the B-side. That whole ‘Deep Cuts’ thing was all about the attention he felt that his magnificence hadn’t received back in the day. I remember an interview with him in Kerrang after Hot Space where he moaned and moaned, resenting and scorning the others for not seeing things his way.

The guy’s entire career rests on the singer he reluctantly allowed to join the band and now he’s got no one to spar against, his songwriting has gone to shit. The need to control Queen’s image is bordering on the laughable – as if the Mercury deathbed videos, X-Factor singalikes and the like had left the band’s legacy with any dignity worth preserving!

FWIW, I’ve always seen Taylor as the ‘happy to be a rock star’ member, and May as unhappy to be the same. In the Word Queen piece, May is almost too overanalytical but was keenest to put uberfan Kate Mossman at her ease, which I thought was rather sweet. The fact he’s poured a lot of time, effort and money into animal rights gets an up from me, too. Whatever they do after Freddie died (apart from a silent retirement) they’ll piss someone off. But without Freddie and John Deacon (always my favourite member, being a bassist myself), it’s bound to be a let down for most. Deacon allegedly hit the sauce quite heavily when Freddie was diagnosed, and never really came back after that.

As I said in my review, I stopped being a fan of the music about 1980 but think they’re free to do what they want. From what I’ve seen, Adam Lambert is a good frontman for them – camp as a chicory-based drink and with a mighty voice, but not a Freddie clone. They understand that in the new millennium, different rules apply re putting yourself out there (X factor appearances, endless compilations and reissues etc) – and they were never about good taste anyway. Is it what Freddie would have wanted? Don’t think he’d be bothered either way.

The problem with biopics is that there’s never a satisfactory third act. That and the wigs.

Given so many advances in CGI and the rest, wig technology is severely lagging – and lacking. I’m guessing the high point was some time in the 17th century.

As for Queen, I lost interest in them precisely when Bohemian Rhapsody (the single) and A Night at the Opera came out – the first few albums (and indeed ANATO) were fantastic – inventive, original and they were a great rock band. Despite their success, the subsequent material (except maybe Under Pressure) was a real curate’s egg. And isn’t Brian May’s guitar tone one of the most horrible sounds in rock?

I think Brian May is an awful guitarist – always have. His tone is horrible and he tries to put too many notes into every solo. The exception being Killer Queen which is fab.
I saw the trailer to this film and I thought that the guy who played Frwssie looked like a pantomime Freddie. Was that the intention?

Oh I like his playing. I especially like the solo on “Bo Rhap” which is a good example of his cascade of notes thing – perfectly in time though, and it couldn’t be anyone else. Generally i think he is a good bloke and one of the great guitarists.

Yes, I agree. Inventive and with a great sense of melody. Of course he was never *cool* and was always rather too polite and well-educated for the hipsters but he is up there with the best of them in my book. You can actually sing some of his solos. Rhythmically sound, unlike the sometimes plodding and inelegant Page.

Page is a great soloist from a chaos is good perspective but they are a right mess – on The Song Remains the Same you can hear that pretty much every one had been replaced and even then they are all over the place. May is elegant and controlled and if hipsters don’t like him for being intelligent, skilled and polite that’s their loss!

I believe the soundtrack album features the whole Live Aid performance for the first time, so that might be enough of a USP to get some decent Christmas gift sales happening, and the film was a huge hit in the UK this opening weekend, way way outperforming the recent-ish openings of A Star is Born, The Greatest Showman, La La Land and Les Miserables…

… and it probably won’t be a popular opinion, but I’m actually rather impressed with how Bri & Rog have kept the Queen brand going, way over 25 years after Freddie’s death, with the tours, the stage show, and now the movie… like Abba, they’ve managed to become (arguably) even bigger on a mainstream worldwide basis than they ever were as “just bands” in their respective lifetimes, which is a good trick if you can do it, however much it might irk the purists…

I’m a “greatest hits” fan of Queen at best, so I don’t have a dog in this race at all, but I think it’s easy to forget that “Queen” is Brian, Roger & John (sleeping partner)’s actual job, i.e. what they do for a living, and (crass metaphor alert) they’ve managed to keep the old firm going very successfully despite the death of the CEO & Chairman a long time ago…

… and no, of course they haven’t produced anything new of note for decades, but the fact is, younger people are at least as familar with the music of Queen (and Abba, since I brought them up) as they are with the Beatles and the Stones, and that’s their primary aim, so job done…

One unpopular opinion might be that it’s a lot easier to keep a brand going once a troublesome key member is out of the picture and unable to object to any potentially lucrative – if not artistically satisfying – remixes, reissues and/or tours. Whether Pink Floyd or The Beatles, The Doors or Ian Dury, dying makes for one hell of a living.

Chatting to a couple of people recently who were on the verge of going they expressed surprise that I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. My reason being that I liked Queen – I saw them live three or four times and they were a bloody good rock band in the early days up to “Sheer Heart Attack” and bits of “A night at the opera”. I didn’t really espouse the “Freddie Mercury as a national treasure” thing. I don’t want to see a film that will be worse than the band that I enjoyed.
Give me “Slade in Flame” anytime.

My sentiments exactly. I have always been a huge fan of Queen, but I have less than zero interest in this film. Frankly I think it’s about time Brian May and Roger Taylor followed John Deacon’s lead and stayed quietly at home counting their money.

Watched it today – the fellow I saw it with was quite put out that there was no mention of “Highlander”, and solemnly concluded that they must have just been unable to find someone who could convincingly play David Bowie.

We saw it at the weekend and enjoyed it, despite the woeful script , acting and plot. The Live Aid bit was great and brought back a lot of memories of that day and that time ( aged 23, didn’t go but everyone got together all day for it, lovely ) shed a few tears at this point.
Why did they go out of their way to make John Deacon some sort of moronic, gurning idiot? I don’t think May and Taylor come out of it well because of it, shame.

Went to see this yesterday. It’s not the most complex plot in the world (“Freddie joins a band; band makes it big; Freddie acts like a cunt; Freddie sees the error of his ways; band makes it big again”) but I thought it was really enjoyable. Rami Malek nails Freddie’s speaking voice perfectly, and as mentioned further up, they found a perfect Deaky-alike in Joseph Mazzello and Gwilym Lee IS BRIAN MAY! I remain unconvinced by “Roger” and his eternal fresh-faced look however. I found parts of it surprisingly moving (Freddie and Mary watching a Brazilian crowd sing “Love Of My Life”), and I’m not ashamed to say I simultaneously had tears in my eyes and a big old grin on my face during the Live Aid segment. My favourite part though? Good old Deaky breaking up a fight between Freddie and Roger by playing the bassline to Another One Bites The Dust. Funk Rock saves the day!

I saw it yesterday and it’s a very odd film indeed. Despite this, it is doing excellent business and seems to be an international hit. As a wonky history of Queen, as others have commented, it plays fast and loose with the real order of events, which is annoying for those of us who remember things like this. Given how carefully May and Taylor have been curating the band’s history, this approach seems peculiar, although it works dramatically.

However, Rami Malek really struggles with the role of Freddie, mainly because of the storyline he has to work with and the inner struggle he seems to be battling. It’s hard to imagine anyone having more fun in being a rock star than Freddie Mercury at the height of Queen’s success, yet this Freddie is misery and gloom incarnate. In his accent and intonation Malek sounds more like John Hurt’s Elephant Man than F. Mercury. And then there are the prosthetics. Not only should they have their own agent, they should fire him or her. Poor old Rami spends most of the movie looking as if he has had a lengthy session at the dentist. Think Dudley Moore in 10.

I endured it. I can’t say I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t so bored or annoyed that I felt like leaving. But its success mystifies me, just as Queen’s did.

Against my better judgement went to see this last night (am trying to go to the cinema weekly and nothing else took my fancy). Most of the reviews above have it spot on, weak script, the timeline is an unbelievable travesty and Malek is good. Live Aid was good, Bob Geldof wasn’t. Best line was by Mike Myers. If this wins best film at the Oscars we are truly doomed.

Yeah, and the actor they got to play David Hepworth interviewing Geldof at Live Aid didn’t look anything like the Amazing Heppo.
They clearly thought that it wasn’t as important as finding a guy who looks JUST LIKE Brian May to play Brian May, and yeah … I can understand that.